


My Angel With Downcast Eyes

by kmo



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Les adieux à la reine | Farewell My Queen (2012)
Genre: F/F, Femslash12, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-29
Updated: 2012-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-19 20:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The queen reflects on her relationship with Gabrielle de Polignac, from their first meeting through the events of the movie. Should be accessible to fans of the historical Marie Antoinette who haven't seen <i>Farewell My Queen</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	My Angel With Downcast Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marginalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginalia/gifts).



It was a day like any other since I had come to Versailles. Nobles simpered, bowed, gossiped around me, marquises and chevaliers preening like peacocks and cockatiels in their lace and silk. Amidst this grotesque menagerie, there was but one who stood with shoulders back and head erect, with an air of such uncultivated naturalness, it took one’s breath away. The noblewoman sprang like a wild rose among so many fragile hothouse blooms.

When the time came for her to be presented to me, she made an elegant curtsey, violet eyes staring boldly back at me all the while. I have seen even the most polished courtiers tremble in the presence of their queen. But in the moment when Gabrielle de Polignac’s eyes met mine, ‘twas I, not she, who trembled.

*******

From that moment on, I was lost. It seemed to me hers was the only friendly face to be found in the nest of vipers otherwise known as Versailles. ‘Twas certainly the only face I ever longed to see, my blue eyes seeking out her violet ones across the palace’s mirrored halls. I believed her to be my one true confidant amid a chorus of false ones, an angel surrounded by an army of demons. While others filled my ears with calculating lies in hopes of gaining this boon or that position, it seemed Gabrielle spoke naught but kindness. She alone cared for her queen as a woman of flesh and not as a giver of favors.

False flattery I could dismiss. Deception I could see through. But to Gabrielle de Polignac’s sweetness, I had no defense. There are some who whisper my angel’s naturalness was its own form of artifice and I was a fool to have been taken in by it. Perhaps what they say is true. And yes, perhaps for one such as her, I was willing to be deceived.

*******

I cannot say when I realized what I felt for the young _duchese_ crossed the boundaries between what a queen may feel for a favorite into something both Church and court would condemn as unnatural. But cross over it did. I knew it in the way my heart beat like a hummingbird within its corseted cage every time her hands clasped mine, in the way my eyes grew wide and hungry every time I spied her across a crowded ballroom. Most of all, in the sorrow I felt in her absence, a keening longing greater than anything I had ever felt for my husband.

At first I thought such feelings could not be true, could not be the passion men feel for women. Two ladies together- ‘twas naught but some lewd engraving found in a dirty book, I thought. But the more I longed for her beside me, waking and sleeping, the more I knew the passion I felt was all too real. And there was nothing dirty about it.

*******

I held my feelings close for many years, too afraid to speak them aloud for to do so would be to make them real.  And for all that I was Queen of France, I feared my beloved would find my desires monstrous. I could not bear to see shame and condemnation reflected in the face I loved most. Or worse, for her to come to me out of cold, passionless duty. I shared my secret longings with no one, not even my confessor, not even God Himself, all the while searching from some hidden sign. Did she catch her breath when her fingers met mine?  When the Duchese shared my bed and we slept like sisters side by side, did she ache for my touch as I did for hers? After years and months of patient waiting and seeing, I thought it unlikely that our love was ever to be more than a chaste one. 

Until the Comte de Vaudreuil came along.

*******

Oh, when it came to my ears that my darling angel had sullied herself with that arrogant, pig-headed scoundrel, how I raged. Letters torn, inkpots thrown, and at least a maidservant or two reduced to tears on my behalf. I lost all restraint, all reason. That Gabrielle should be forbidden to me, I was prepared to accept. That she would willingly give herself to a popinjay like Vaudreuil made me sick with jealousy.

I raged and cried for days, retreated into my sanctuary at Petit Trianon and forbid her from my royal presence. Somehow, I do not know how, but somehow Gabrielle came to me bearing a posy of the wild roses she knew were my favorite. She silently knelt at my feet, drying my tears with her own soft fingers.

“You dare to come here after what you’ve done?” I snapped at her, my voice hoarse and ugly from crying.

She laid her dark curls in my lap, and oh, it was enough to rend my heart in two, caught between desire and fury as I was. “You must not believe all you hear of me. There are those at court who would use rumor and scandal to poison you against me, my queen,” she told me sorrowfully.

I tipped her head up so that I could gaze into her extraordinary indigo eyes, ripe as plums. “Am I ‘your queen?’ Still?” 

Gabrielle’s gaze was unwavering. “Your Majesty is always foremost in my heart.”

“Prove it,” I said, voice shaking even as I commanded it.

Gabrielle, to my surprise, did not look shocked, but simply nodded her assent. What she thought in that moment, I could not have known in the slightest. She rose gracefully and went to my chamber door, telling the housekeeper that Her Majesty was resting and did not wish to be disturbed. She turned the brass key in the lock and the click of its tumblers sent me thrumming with anticipation and desire.

My angel came to me, brazenly bent her lips to mine, and her kiss held more sweetness than I had ever imagined. With hands as nimble as any maidservant’s, she undressed me first and then herself. When she laid me on the bed and her naked breast brushed my own, I was awed by the softness of it. I wanted to shield my eyes, to call off this act, but Gabrielle hushed my lips with kisses until all my protests turned to moans. 

In our lovemaking, she was bold and fearless. As she was in everything.

*******

As queen, one becomes used to having one’s every whim fulfilled. I can feast on imported _chocolat_  sweetened with sugar from sun-kissed Saint-Dominguefor breakfast every day. My silken gowns and jewel-toned shoes number greater than the days in the year. If I take a fancy for a ruby large as a chicken’s egg, a color caught between pigeon’s blood and fuchsia, some enterprising courtier shall undoubtedly lay it at my feet within a fortnight or three.

Not just things, but people too, fall within my dominion. Take my sparrow of a _lectrice_. Madamoiselle LeBlanc or Lamarque or whatever that sad girl’s name is would give me her heart on a platter were I ever to ask it of her. I daresay the poor creature, sick with devotion as she is, would carve it from her breast herself with but a moment’s hesitation.

Love is a perverse thing. It would seem the fates have cursed me never to love those who so adore me. My heart beats for Gabrielle and none other, the only person whose spirit I could never truly reign over. And I am forced to admit that knowing I cannot have all of her makes me desire her all the more.

*******

The end, when it comes, comes all too quickly. Its first harbinger, those sheets of smut and scandal. These heartless demagogues, like a fire or a plague, they seek only to destroy. What do they know of love? They twist our love into a grotesque mockery of the truth. I take their foul seditious words and consign them to the flames before my angel can read them. I will not let their filth touch her.

Though when she comes to me later, the look in her eyes tells me the poisoned dart of the rabble has struck its mark. She is there and not there, her touches lack their warmth, and when the time comes for me to retire, she does not offer to come to my bed and I dare not ask her to join me.

*******

I cry myself to sleep that night. I mourn, I do not know what, but I mourn. I suppose in my heart I knew from that moment on that Gabrielle was lost to me, no matter what I did.

In the morning, I wake and I see my path laid out before me, as clear and as barren as a field in winter.

When I tell Gabrielle of my scheme to spirit her and the Duc to safety, tears spring to her eyes, but she gives her assent with little protest. That she should agree to leave me fractures some unknown part of my soul beyond repair. Would I have liked for my own vanity’s sake to see her cry and beg not to leave my side? To fall to her knees and proclaim she would rather die than be parted from me? Yes, of course.

But the woman who would have done that was not Gabrielle de Polignac, was not the woman I loved.

*******

She is gone now, departed with her husband and my faithful _lectrice_ in a carriage bound for the border not three hours ago.

An odd thing to see my sparrow clad in my angel’s gown, that riot of green silk I had made especially for her by my own dressmaker. I remember the first day she wore it. Gabrielle seeing her beauty reflected infinitely in the Hall of Mirrors whispered to me, “Is this color wise, my queen? Those at court who resent your favor toward me will think you seek to insult them. For green is the color of envy.”

I basked in the warmth of her presence and cared for nothing else. “Let them think whatever they like. Besides, everyone knows that this shade of green is not the color of envy; it is the color of life.” 

The color of life.

I do not suppose that God hears my prayers, but if He were to grant me one boon, I pray that my Gabrielle lives. The world beyond Versailles’ marbled halls and manicured lawns seems more and more turned upside down. I wish the king had listened to me and we had fled when the trouble first started. But he is stubborn and thinks if we hold our ground these revolutionaries can be brought to heel.

I am not so hopeful. My heart is filled with a deep foreboding.  But whatever darkness the future holds, I will hold on to the hope that my angel lives. These radicals may take my crown from me, my gold and jewels. They may evict me from this gilded cage of a palace that has never felt like home. They may even take my life. But they cannot take my love, I have seen to that.

 

**Author's Note:**

> In the story, I've tried to flesh out what is depicted in the movie with historical accounts of their relationship. The title is taken from the following phrase in Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette:
> 
> "Not even Madame de Maintenon, not even the Pompadour, cost as much as this favourite, this angel, with downcast eyes, this modest and gentle Polignac. Those who were not themselves swept into the whirlpool, stood at the marge contemplating it with astonishment ... [as] the Queen's hand was invisibly guided by the violet-eyed, the lovely, the gentle Polignac.”


End file.
